EPORIA and leading gourmet food purveyor D’Artagnan announced that D’Artagnan’s eCommerce website, which was launched in October on the EPORIA platform, generated higher online sales for the months of December and January than the company has ever seen, with January seeing double digit sales growth over 2009.

“Launching in time for our busiest season was key for us, so we could capitalize on holiday traffic and convert visitors on the new platform,” said Katie Holler, Director of eCommerce for the 25-year-old gourmet food company. “EPORIA helped us every step of the way, from design to implementation, and met our tight timeframe with a week to spare!” The two companies collaborated closely to accomplish this feat. “As a result,” says Holler, “we had the best December online in the history of the business, and the month of January was up 17% over last year.”

Recognizing the desire for increased online sales and a richer online presence for its expanding clientele, D’Artagnan selected EPORIA for their focus on results, and for the platform’s robust feature set, which is perfectly suited to an elite gourmet food brand like D’Artagnan.

The website’s extraordinary results began immediately after launch. EPORIA’s search engine friendly platform and comprehensive SEO expertise led to rapid indexing of the new website’s pages–nearly 90% of the new pages were listed in search engines within just days after launch. “We were extremely impressed with the results,” says Holler. “Just two weeks after launch, our rankings on the first three pages of search returns increased 400%. I’ve never seen a site index so fast.”

“From the day we launched, our daily order volume and average order value have seen double digit increases and our conversion rate has already nearly tripled,” Holler reports. In the due diligence phase of researching potential eCommerce solutions and partners, Holler often told the EPORIA team that the EPORIA eCommerce solution sounded “too good to be true.” Since the launch, Holler confirms that “we can now see the results for ourselves, and it’s true—EPORIA really is that good. And on top of it, they offer a great value for your investment.”

In this final post of our series on Guidelines for Good Web Design, we’re wrapping it up with the element that ties all of the other pieces together – consistency.

Consistency is critical to good web design to ensure everything matches. Heading sizes, fonts, colors, spacing, navigation, etc. Good web design should be consistently themed to be coherent from one page to the next and within a single page. Consistency is the most important factor that separates websites that are taken seriously and those that are not. Therefore, if you’re in the business of selling online, consistency in your design should be at the top of your priority list.

Consistency in your site design is about being professional. Inconsistencies in your web design are like spelling mistakes – they lower the perception of your professionalism. Whether your design is simple or complex, keeping it consistent will make it appear more professional and trustworthy in the eyes of your visitors.

The simplest way to produce a consistent web design is to do a lot of thinking and second guessing about how your visitors will use your site before it is ever taken live. Also, having good CSS stylesheets can be of a tremendous help in ensuring a consistent and visually appealing design.

Putting it All Together

As previously posted, the Guidelines for Good Web Site Design include the following elements:

Design for Scanning – Your site should be easy for your visitors to scan to find the information they’re looking for.

White Space – Effective use of white space makes your design look cleaner and helps to keep visitors on the path you want them to take with less distractions.

Site Navigation – Your site navigation should be obvious and provide your visitors with a clear sense of where they are on your site.

Design to Build – Out of this world web design is great, so long as it isn’t complex to the point of being a barrier to building your site.

Text and Formatting – The text you choose for your web site is among the most important design elements you need to consider. Put serious thought into fonts, text colors, font sizes, spacing, etc.

Usability – Think about who will be visiting your site, what they want, and what you want them to do. If your site is challenged from a usability perspective – it will also be challenged in creating significant conversion rates.

Alignment – Think of the alignment of a site’s design as a grid, with everything fitting squarely in place. The effective use of alignment can also have a positive effect on your conversion rates.

Crisp and Sharp Design – Think at the pixel level like a professional web designer would to ensure your design elements look as crisp and professional as possible. Fuzzy graphics, or poorly done text as images, only take away from the professionalism and trustworthiness of your site.

Consistency – As addressed in this post. Consistency can be considered as the glue that binds. Regardless of the elements you chose for your site design, consistency is among the most critical.

Click on any of the above links to read the previous posts in this series.

Keeping your web site design looking crisp and sharp requires thinking at the pixel level. Sure, everything in your CSS will be pixel perfect, but in software such as Photoshop you’re going to have to work for it. To achieve a sharp design for your images and graphics you have to:

Keep the edges of your images snapped to pixels, which may involve manually cleaning up shapes and lines if you’re working in Photoshop.

Make sure any text that is created as an image is sharpened or smoothed for the best effect to match the rest of your web design.

Ensure you use high contrast were appropriate to clearly define boarders.

Look at your site, is it truly crisp and sharp across the board? If not, it’s time to start thinking in pixels.

All good web designers understand the importance of using alignment to create associations between visual elements of a web page, which helps site visitors easily understand the objects on the page.

Alignment in web design works by visually associating multiple elements in a way that the elements become instinctively related to one another or share some other commonality. In many cases, simply aligning images and text to the left of the page, or centering it, can make a big difference in how the content is perceived.

As a general rule, you can think of the alignment of a website’s design as a grid, with everything fitting squarely in place. As boring as this may sound it works, since it provides a strong sense of order and is easy for the eye to follow. Sure you’ve seen sites that violate the guidelines of structured alignment, and you may even remember them for that reason. However, for most of our needs, a lack of structured alignment takes away from the flow of our message. Especially if the message is to get a visitor to take action when they land on a web page.

Think about how you would respond to two different web pages that were designed to sell you something. The first page used a top left alignment, and the second page used a right bottom alignment. Of course the first page using top left alignment would make a stronger impression, since we instinctively expect important information to be presented in this manner. As simple as this example may seem, it is a good representation of how you should think about the alignment of your web design. In other words, the alignment should follow an instinctive course and offer a clear and flowing association of the various elements used.

As creative and fun as it may be to try new and different alignments in your web design, keep in mind human nature and what best presents the message you want your visitors to receive. Sure there isn’t anything new and exciting about top left alignment in design. However, it works, and if you’re in the business of selling online that’s what is most important. Results.

As important as a great looking website is, it’s not going to perform well if it isn’t easy for your visitors to interact with. Therefore, web designers need to ensure they provide for both eye appeal and a site that’s designed for easy use.

Although, we have previously covered some areas of usability such as navigation and text, here are some more important considerations:

Adhering to Standards – When a visitor lands on your web site there are certain things they expect, and not providing them leads to confusion and site abandonment. A basic example is the use of underlined text. If text is underlined, we all expect it to be a link. Doing this is not a good usability practice. Sure, it’s alright to break the mold in some areas of your web design, so long as they aren’t in areas that affect how people instinctively interact with a web site.

Prototyping – Before taking your site live, develop a prototype and test drive it with an open eye for quirks. Often, when you use a design as your visitor’s actually would, you’ll notice even small details that can make a big difference in overall usability and conversion rates. As the mantra for online success goes, “Test, test, and test some more”. The more you test your site, the more successful it will be.

Think about what users will do – In order for your site design to be truly successful, you need to be thinking about what visitors coming to your site will actually do. Take the time to make a list of the different types of tasks visitors might do on your site and the actions you want them to take, such as making a purchase or completing a form. You want to make it as easy as possible for people to understand how to achieve the tasks they want to complete as soon as they land on any page of your site. Therefore, you want to make sure your navigation is optimized site wide for common tasks such as shopping, contacting you, learning more about you, etc. Every page of your site should also have an easily accessible search box for those that need extra help. At the end of the day, good web site design is about producing a site that is easy for your visitors to use while achieving your company goals. Anything less isn’t acceptable.

The more you make your site adhere to conventional standards that users expect, test your site, and think about what your visitors want, the better your site will be. Go ahead, be fresh and daring with your design ideas, just make sure that you don’t break the rules to the point that you confuse your visitors, or reduce the conversion rates of your site for the sake of design.

The text you choose for your web site is among the most important design elements you need to consider. Even though you may have always liked Arial font on previous sites, a new project may not necessarily look as good with this tried and true font. To set off the overall look of a site, you sometimes have to step out of your comfort zone and use a wild and crazy font such as Verdana or even Times New Roman. Since font style is such an important element of good web design it’s important to consider things like:

Font Choices – As mentioned above different fonts make a difference in the overall look of your design. Some fonts such as Arial look more contemporary, whereas others like Times New Roman look more traditional. Make sure you’re using the right font that best complements your design.

Font Sizes – Some of us still think it’s cool to use really small text such as Arial 8pt font for our main page copy. As great as this might look, it’s not comfortable for most people to actually read. Make sure you’re using font sizes that are consistent and large enough to be comfortably read. Also, make sure that things such as headings and subheadings standout appropriately so visitors can quickly understand the concept of your page without having think about it.

Spacing – The spacing you chose to use between lines is important to consider. You don’t want your line spacing to be too bunched up or too separated. Make sure your spacing choice is both reflective of your design and easy to read.

Line Length – Some of us like longer lines of text and some of us prefer shorter lines. Either way, your lines of text shouldn’t be too long. As a rule, long lines of text are harder to read. Generally smaller columns of text work better.

Text Color – A lot of really cool web sites use low-contrast text. Although, this may look good from a design perspective, it isn’t comfortable for most of us to read. This being the case, it’s recommended to try avoiding this practice.

Paragraph Alignment – Most of the time your text alignment should be the obvious choice of being set to the left, since this is how people read (left to right). Sure you may center text on occasion for headers, image captions, etc. However, stay away from justifying your text. Justified text always looks weird since it ends up having odd spacing between words. This not only makes your text harder to read, but it makes your design look less than professional.

Now, take a look at your site and really consider the above elements and how they affect the look and feel of your site. Sometimes the simplest changes to the visual elements of your text can significantly improve the look of your site. As with everything else in web design, details count. How’s your text looking?

Thanks to CSS layouts building great looking websites has gotten a lot easier, but you still need to do some thinking while you’re in the ‘design’ mode. Things you want to consider include:

Can it be done? – Are your design ideas compatible with current standards? If not you may have fonts that don’t render properly due to not being standard HTML fonts and other issues that affect your design from rendering properly in different commonly used browsers.

Are you thinking about screen sizes? – What happens to your design when a screen resizes? Is the design centered or left aligned? Do you want your design to be fixed or fluid to adapt to various screen sizes and why or why not?

Are you attempting something technically difficult? – Even though CSS positioning can make things easier, some issues such as vertical alignment can still be a problem and in some cases may be best to avoid.

Can small design changes simplify how the site is built? – Sometimes simply moving an object in your design can make a difference in how you have to code your CSS later on. In cases where design elements cross over each other, it can create complexity for the build. For example, if you have a few separate design objects the site may be easier to build. In comparison to a site design in which multiple elements overlap each other. Yes, overlapping can be easy, but it may add some complexity to the actual build.

You always want to be looking for the perfect balance between what looks good to the eye and what can simplify the build. If you’re building a small 10 page informational web site more complex design issues may not be much of a concern. However, this can be a completely different story for an enterprise level ecommerce site consisting of thousands of pages.

So whether you’re a site designer, or you’re a business owner working with a web design company to built your web site, the above issues should be brought up. Sometimes it’s really the little things that can make a big difference in how well a site looks, works, and ultimately performs. In designing an effective web site, every detail counts.